2.Luis Villa: decadencetieguy.org6 commentsSocialRank I’d contribute to the decadence discussion, except I think I’ve already said what needed to be said three years ago and a year and a half ago and again.I will, though, point to this (and other posts that

Seeing It seems like we can blow our own trumpet….., I have been ranting for ages about the need for someone to help me write a conduit.net online sync backed for GNOME, that integrates into the desktop the same way Conduit does. No takers, and I would rather finish Conduit first.

But alas, the real problem is not a shortage of ideas, its a shortage of manpower, and more specifically, a shortage of people who finish work they start, or propose to start.

It’s a little of both ideas and manpower. In particular, I think GNOME (any mature project, really) tends to attract people who are satisfied with the state of things as they are. You may well need to reach out to a new community of people to find those who aren’t satisfied with the current state of things and want radically new features like what you’re proposing. It isn’t coincidence that GNOME wasn’t written by emacs hackers- they were (mostly) satisfied with what they had; it needed new, different blood to push for GNOME. I have a feeling the same will be true of the next wave, though I’d love to be wrong.

Making those next waves means sometimes surprisingly little amount of work. For instance Gnome really is not THAT big of a creature to recreate. The problem is in vision and management, not in the amount of available or active work force.

Yet KDE has found the willpower to do something new with KDE 4, so why can’t GNOME? I don’t want to leave this completely unanswered though, so here’s my theory: I guess GNOME essentially controlling GTK+, which was always touted as an advantage, is actually a drawback: in KDE world, Trolltech picked up the initiative by making major changes to Qt in Qt 4, KDE in turn had to port to that and used the opportunity to make major changes of their own, also using some of the cool new features in Qt 4. That kind of initiative is missing in the GTK+/GNOME world.

Kevin: I think that’s an interesting point about the QT< ->KDE relationship; if people give you new tools that they developed for other motivations, it may be easier to get things bootstrapped.

That said, I don’t actually think KDE4 is particularly innovative from what I’ve seen of it. There is some interesting stuff, but nothing that makes me think ‘this is fundamentally different from windows 3.1.’ Maybe I’m missing it, though.